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Missed call to pay on KooKoo using UPI

By C Chaitanya
The launch of UPI can be considered as a watershed moment. This has opened up a whole new way of sending and receiving payments and will surely lead to a lot of innovation.
The API is really well designed for a government effort. But guess it was expected given the great efforts put in by a lot of volunteers. So,hats off to them.
Whenever innovative things happen, you know KooKoo is not far behind :)
So, in this blog post, I will show you an easy way to collect payments using a missed call.

1. Register for a KooKoo missed call account. and specify an app URL. You will receive a missed call number.
2. When some one calls on your missed call number, KooKoo makes a http request to your URL with the caller details.
3. Build UPI payment request URL based on specification provided by NCPI. So lets say your VPA is ozonetel@somebank and you need to request Rs.2, your request will be something like, upi://pay?pa=ozonetel@somebank&am=2.
4. Send this link in an SMS back to the caller. The caller can use this link to pay for the amount.

Wanna see this in action, just give a  
Missed Call to +918030088469(080-30088469)

I have made some small adjustments. Since the upi:// protocol is still not recognized by messaging apps, I have redirected through a web URL so that the link becomes clickable. Just click on the link in the SMS and pay. This assumes you have an app installed which understands UPI(This is most of the bank apps)

This is a very basic use case which we have showcased. You can now use a phone number to collect payments. You can even do IVR payments. 

UPI is still in early stages. This is really good for P2P payments, but the merchant payment piece is still lagging in some respects. I am sure, things will be resolved soon.

Thanks:

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